Is nature trully chaotic?

[S@tanicoaldo]

I often see people claim that humans represent order and nature represents chaos.

I... I just can see that.

Humans are umpredicable and chaotic, while nature has rules, is geometrical and organzied.

https://mathmunch.files.wordpress.com/2013/06/honeycomb-random-32405548-1200-800.jpg
https://www.mmroses.com.au/images/golden-fairytale.jpg
https://ka-perseus-images.s3.amazonaws.com/99f0d5b55fdb423d245aaa1b2cc86b46ec8891fb.png
https://eeenergy.files.wordpress.com/2012/01/rain_water_harvesting.jpg
https://media.istockphoto.com/photos/four-seasons-picture-id531608627

Where does the chaotic nature ideia comes from?

[ve4grm]

Nature is full of order, yes. But it's generally single pieces of order, which then interact with each other. There's no single governing structure or hierarchy.

Imagine a country. Say, the USA. You have local governments, which report to state governments, which report to the national government. And every business or person falls under those governing structures in some way. We also like to impose this order on our land, and the nature around it, but nature doesn't always like to cooperate.

Nature, on the other hand, is more like if every city and town did their own thing. How they operate will affect the towns beside them, but not through any direct control. Let's say town A decided to abolish all taxes, but also ban chocolate. All the towns around them would feel the effects, with people moving to town A to get better taxes, or traveling between towns to buy chocolate. All the nearby towns (and people) would need to adapt to survive, based on what one tiny town did.

So yeah, there is order, but it's a different kind. Individual pieces all have order, but nobody is in charge. Everything is in a kind of tenuous balance, and minor changes can have wide-reaching consequences with nobody to take responsibility. And if a change happens to be bad for one particular group, the strongest group will win and the weaker group might just be wiped out.

A single beehive might be geometric and patterned, but that population of bees can be wiped out by a slightly long winter. A single flower may be beautiful and symmetrical, but where those flowers spread to depends on the wind, animal migrations, and more.

When people refer to nature as chaotic, this is more what they're talking about. The interaction between systems. It can be uncaring, unforgiving, and unpredictable.

(This is also why weather forecasts are unreliable past 5 days. We can only predict things so far, as the systems involved have so many variables behind them.)

.

On the other hand, we have humans. Humans, on an individual level, are chaotic. But we organize ourselves into ordered structures, and have for millenia. So humans are chaotic, but human society is ordered. Nature is full of order, but as a whole is fairly chaotic.

It's weird to think about, right?

[sktarq]

Order is what people like to call what they think they can control, or at least make sense of. Humans like to think they make sense and control their own fates....So we often WANT to be considered orderly.

Nature at small scale (daily life) has a random component. Also it can be hard to understand without records and tools etc.

so those things that are not controlled and poorly understood must be chaos.

so nature is chaotic.


Really it is just nature doesn't do what we tell it to. It doesn't confirm to OUR idea of order and thus must be chaos.

[BannedInSchool]

A complex set of interacting differential equations. Yup, that's chaotic. :smallwink:

[KarlMarx]

If we look at the universe over time as a whole, it's easy to predict where it'll end up, at heat-death. As we look at smaller and smaller pieces, though, they get harder and harder to predict, because more things are acting on them that have to be accounted for (insofar as we know, nothing that isn't the universe acts on the universe, while the same isn't true for a forest or human society).

Smaller things are less predictable, and thus, more chaotic.

When analyzing human society, though, we have an intuitive understanding to a much greater degree than normal, but it's fallacious to infer that human society is more ordered as a result.

[Jay R]

In a scientific context, "chaotic" means "non-linear". We see non-linear effects in turbulence, weather patterns, the three-body problem, quantum mechanics, and many other aspects of nature.

[Telonius]

The same natural laws work equally well on every bit of matter in the universe. If bit of matter X is under conditions A, B, and C, then Y will happen as a result.

That's not to say that everything is set in stone; randomness does occur in nature. (Radioactive decay, for example). But once the process that brings about the randomness happens, order re-establishes.

To the OP, though, I'd say that drawing a distinction between humans and nature is not that well-advised. We're part of nature too. The only part that we know of that's as self-aware as we are; but we start getting into all sorts of trouble when we start thinking we're distinct from our context.

As far as where that idea comes from... back ten thousand years ago, "nature" (as in the natural world in general) was a whole lot more threatening than it is now. Predators bigger than we are, and no such thing as a gun to kill them with. Plagues that happen for no apparent reason, that kill (or don't) with no apparent pattern. Weather that we can't track that appears with no warning. Earthquakes, forest fires, floods, droughts - all of that stuff happened, and we were generally victims of it. The only way we had of making sense of it is against forum rules to get into. It was, as far as we were concerned, random and chaotic. We had no way to predict any of it.

But - in the tiny settlements we made? People were the safe place. People meant safety, a defense against the truly frightening things outside the camp. To our experience, people meant safety, stability, and order.

That situation lasted for almost the entirety of human history. We killed nearly all of the big predators; we're the most dangerous creatures in the world now. We have vaccines and weather forecasting and medicine and all of that other stuff. It kind of obscures just how terrifying the world was before we understood as much of it as we do now.

[khadgar567]

you know nature is actually lawful like cthulhu lawful is to perfectly weirdly balanced that we still try to learn how to produce fire like our cave man cousins

[brian 333]

Nature in D&D has actually always been Neutral. Some natural processes appear chaptic, but some appear orderly.

Rainstorms, for example, appear seemingly out of nowhere, create varying degrees of destruction, and then blow away. With modern tracking systems we can ses the development and movement of such systems, but five generations ago this was not the case: nobody could predict the rain.

Volcanoes sit for generations doing nothing, then suddenly and for no reason begin to rumble and spew smoke. Usually they settle back down, but once in a while they explode violently for no reason.

When there was no way to measure snow accumulation, the arrival of Spring floods was a mixed bag of hope and fear. Would enough water come to prep the fields? Would so much come that it would flood the town? How could anyone predict it?

All of these seemingly chaotic systems have rules, but it takes satellites, seismic detectors, and snow gauges to begin to unravel the rules, and even when we think we know the rules, Nature surprises us.

It works the other way as well. What appears orderly is often the result of random chance. For example, the colonization of a beaver pond is accomplished by luck: what happens to arrive first has the best chance of securing the space and resources it needs, making later arrivals less likely to thrive. From the start, to us, anyway, a beaver pond appears to be a calm, organized, orderly place. But down there war is being waged.

A forest is another example of chaos concealed by order. Did you know that trees are constantly at war with one another? Peaceful forests with trees spaced apart just so far giving each just enough sunlight are battle zones where the combatants use chemical warfare on one another as they spread out roots to claim territory and spread branches to steal the energy others need. Ever notice how few plants grow beneath mature oak trees? Their leaves secrete toxic tannin which poisons the ground. A few plants tolerate this and can thrive beneath, or in, oak trees, but most simply die. And don't park your car under pine trees: their toxic sap doesn't wash off in water.

TLDR: Nature is orderly and random, sustaining and slaying its constituents with the same breath. What seems random operates on rules we can learn and understand, and what appears orderly and easily understood can reveal hidden levels of randomness. Nature is, and has always been, Neutral.

[Tvtyrant]

What sense are we using chaos here? Because I have heard arguments that nature (ie evolution) actually violates entropy by becoming more complicated and less uniform over time.

[warty goblin]

What sense are we using chaos here? Because I have heard arguments that nature (ie evolution) actually violates entropy by becoming more complicated and less uniform over time.

Nothing about that violates entropy. You can locally decrease entropy by increasing it somewhere else, and notably evolution runs on constant inputs of energy from an outside source.

[Knaight]

Nothing about that violates entropy. You can locally decrease entropy by increasing it somewhere else, and notably evolution runs on constant inputs of energy from an outside source.

Even without that constant input you also generally see entropy increases in the context of individual chemical processes, including anabolism. Sure, you might get a macromolecule out of them, but you also generally get a lot of small molecules with high entropy between them.

The whole "life violates entropy" argument is ridiculous on a lot of levels.

[Ramza00]

In a scientific context, "chaotic" means "non-linear". We see non-linear effects in turbulence, weather patterns, the three-body problem, quantum mechanics, and many other aspects of nature.

If you are referring to chaos theory, chaos is not non linear, but instead 3rd derivatives of the position in respect to time and more derivatives past 3rd derivatives for 3rd derivatives are the smallest system that represents chaos theory.

This is also known as jerk systems for jerks are the physic term for 3rd derivative of the position in respect to time

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory#Jerk_systems

As in Ian Malcom is a Jerk, but he is also right!


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sKv7mB1j80c

But that is the beauty of Chaos, you can be right, but in a truely chaotic situation you do not know EXACTLY when you are right the best you can do is model probabilities and say in this area I would be right, but I can't tell you the exact time and space.

To better explain the metaphor, jerks are the unexpected speedbumps in reality.